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LONDON, June 14 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - It may seem like a subtle difference, but most of what banks call ‘risk management’ is often more akin to ‘risk measurement’. It is a myth that banks are in possession of fancy gadgetry that allows them to measure risk on a minute-by-minute basis from a specialised risk-control tower and react to it effectively, thus averting catastrophe. Instead, the financial crisis and trading losses, such as JPMorgan’s $2 billion blow-up in May, have shown that by the time banks measure and understand their risks, it is too late. Risk management is not about controlling risk, but about offsetting its impact after the fact.

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NEW YORK, May 15 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - Corporate executives and boards face big challenges monitoring risk at complex banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co, which was warned by an investor group last year that its board had “serious deficiencies” and was not up to the task.

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LONDON/NEW YORK, Nov. 22 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) – When the young UBS trader Kweku Adoboli turned himself in after allegedly having lost $2.3 billion on the Swiss bank’s delta one desk, many asked how such a huge loss could have happened without anyone knowing. The short answer was, in part, that Adoboli’s back-office experience gave him inside knowledge which permitted him to game UBS’ control systems and hide the fraud. The same excuse was trotted out to explain Jérôme Kerviel’s $6.8 billion loss at Société Générale in 2008, but it must surely take more than a stint in the bank office to fool banks’ risk controls systems.